Chapter 5 - Monitoring and repair

Summary

PREVIEW

In this chapter you will learn:

• that speakers monitor their own speech for a number of types of well-formedness;

• that the repairs that speakers make to their errors are structured, and that this structure helps listeners;

• that repairs of speech following errors differ from revisions of speech following inappropriateness.

Introduction

A Wellington retailer of electronics goods uses the slogan ‘It’s the putting right that counts.’ This of course promotes the after-sales service of the company as a particular selling point. Cynics might wonder whether it would be better to sell goods that are not likely to break down in the first place.

If we apply this situation to the production of language, what we are looking at is the undeniable fact that language does break down, and that speakers often do something to ‘put it right’. Successful communication, as well as successful retail business, depends on this. The preceding chapters have discussed hesitation phenomena and speech errors as two aspects of how spoken language is not always fluent, and have shown how their study can give us insight into the mechanisms of language production. In this chapter, we will focus on what speakers do to correct errors in their own speech. This implies that speakers monitor their own speech output in order to detect that an error has taken place, and in the next section we will look briefly at why speakers might carry out such self-monitoring. We will then look at examples showing how speakers repair or revise their output. We will see that these repairs and revisions have structure, and that in many cases they reflect the speaker’s sensitivity to the needs of the listener. Since much of the evidence from the structure of self-repair comes from studies of goal-oriented speech production tasks, this chapter will also introduce a selection of such tasks.